LOOK INSIDE: Speaking of Architecture

Acknowledgments

5 by Mark Foster Gage

Foreword

7 by Greg Lynn

10 by Mark Foster Gage

14

Introduction

First Chapter Artificial Intelligence in Architecture

— Karel Klein and David Ruy of Ruy Klein

36

Second Chapter New Forms of Social Engagement

— Mitch McEwen and Amina Blacksher of Atelier Office and Atelier Amina

56

Third Chapter

Oddkins, Hybrids, and Philosophies of Practice

— Ferda Kolatan of SU11 Architecture + Design

78

Fourth Chapter Earth Protectors and MegaComponent Construction

— Tom Wiscombe of Tom Wiscombe Architecture

102

Fifth Chapter Ruins, Rubble, Recycling, and Reuse

Ellie Abrons and Adam Fure of T+E+A+M

124

Sixth Chapter

Strange Architecture vs. Estrangement

Michael Young of Young & Ayata

152

Seventh Chapter Post-Digital Play and other Possible Mediums

— Jimenez Lai and Kristy Balliet of Bureau Spectacular and BairBalliet

180

Eighth Chapter Pop, Color, and Supergraphics

Elena Manferdini and Florencia Pita of Studio Manferdini and Florencia Pita & Co.

200 Ninth Chapter Aesthetics and Architecture in High Resolution

— Mark Foster Gage and Claude Rains of Mark Foster Gage Architects

230 by Cynthia Davidson

Afterword

Acknowledgments

by Mark Foster Gage

This book began as a seminar I taught at the Yale School of Architecture titled “Emerging Schools of Thought” during one of the remote semesters of the COVID-19 crisis. The intent of the course was to treat as an asset the seeming liability of having to teach via video, by embracing the recent global acceptance of virtual meetings. Capitalizing on a seeming abundance of COVID-19 quarantine free-time for scheduling meetings, I organized a weekly interview with architects to discuss, live with the students, the development of their careers, the state of their practices, and their thoughts on the future. The greatest acknowledgment needs to go to these students who braved not only yet another remote semester of learning but were willing to go along with such an experiment in lieu of what would normally be considered a seminar. The students, all part of the Yale Master of Architecture II graduate program, were: Vicky Achnani, Claudia Ansorena, Elise Barker Limon, Bobby Cheng, Stav Dror Shachaf, Samar Halloum, Bingyu He, Lillian Hou, Vignesh Krishnan, Ingrid Liu, Sydney Maubert,

Serge Saab, Saba Salekfard, Steven Sculco, Yuyi Shen, Taiga Taba, Vivian Wu, Jiaxing Yan, Joon Yun, and Yuyi Zhou. Co-leading this endeavor was the teaching assistant who also became both the book designer and managing editor, Chris Pin, who had also worked in my office and was familiar with the ideas being discussed. At the time I was also supervising a PhD student who was part of the Yale / University College of London program, Marie Williams, who offered wonderful insight to the discussions and worked with the students individually to process at a more personal level some of the ideas that emerged during the interviews. This unique course could only have been possible through the continued support for creative ideas by the Yale School of Architecture leadership: Dean Deborah Berke, Associate Dean Phil Bernstein, Associate Dean Sunil Bald, and the key figures of the M. Arch II program of which these students were a part: Joel Sanders, Aniket Shahane, and Bimal Mendes, to name only a few. Of course, very special thanks to the contributors who were willing to be interviewed,

published, and have their work put into the world in this format as part of this project.

They are Michael Young (Young & Ayata);

Elena Manferdini (Atelier Manferdini);

Florencia Pita (Florencia Pita & Co.);

Ferda Kolatan (su11 architecture+design);

Amina Blacksher (Atelier Amina) and V. Mitch McEwen (Atelier Office); Tom Wiscombe (Tom Wiscombe Architecture);

Kristy Balliet (BairBalliet); Ellie Abrons, Adam Fure, Meredith Miller, and Tom

Moran (T+E+A+M); Jiminez Lai (Bureau Spectacular); and Karel Klein and David Ruy (Ruy Klein). I’d also like to thank Gordon Goff and Jake Anderson at ORO Editions for seeing the value of such a project and working so hard to see it documented in this book. A personal thanks to Jarron Magallanes, Gizmo, and Truman for their support and for putting up with a year of amplified Zoom calls from the adjacent room.

Foreword

by Greg Lynn

First, about Mark Foster Gage, the editor of this book. Any introduction of a book edited by Mark requires an in-depth history followed by a clear picture of the present. This is what is so important about his collection of figures and positions: historical depth and contemporary reflection. Personally, I discovered architecture at the end of a period where architecture was dominated by corporate Modernism; a time when Tom Wolf, Prince Charles, and Christopher Alexander were celebrated by 1980s cynical dandies for their pillorying of architects who had adopted the language of Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe. Because of this reactionary moment, I had the good fortune to be taught by what might best be referred to as historical post-Modernists who were educated by precedent and had conducted grand tours of Europe, all in conjunction with teaching design studios. Architectural history courses were abundant and required and I was taught to recognize hundreds, if not thousands, of buildings—and was quizzed to recognize them by either their plan organizations or through single photographs

of their facades. It was a great time to be a sponge for historical information and, other than Robert A. M. Stern, who certainly knew one when he saw one, I never met a fellow sponge so moisturized with knowledge of architectural history than Mark Foster Gage.

As quickly as I experienced this moment of the relevance of architectural history rediscovered for present application, like an enormous souffle, this pedagogy collapsed both culturally and architecturally. Its main proponents abandoned ship and were relegated to the most conservative corners of the field. Post-Modernism retreated to the Hamptons and Disney theme parks; two places where you can still blend in while wearing a bow tie. Many post-Modernists survived by backing off excesses of history while sliding into tastefully refined historicism or high-end modernism realized in more luxurious materials. The real action moved into the future. Two decades of experiments with digital technology followed.

Sandwiched between historical post-Modernism of the early 1980s and the digital of the late 1990s you find an abyss, as most designers located themselves at either end of the spectrum but never in between. In my first year teaching at Yale, however, I met the single occupant of this seeming chasm, Mark Foster Gage—who I would go on to teach seven studios with over my seventeen years at the school. Of his generation, Mark is unique in his ability to compose from a contemporary manual of digital operations and transformations, while unlike his colleagues, he is also able to point these tools towards historical precedents that recall culturally received languages and practices, so they resonate with familiarity and discursive depth, all while retaining their slick gloss of the new. I hope this communicates the fact that this is disturbing to almost everyone in the discipline.

In this regard, Mark is in very good company with others who seek new fusions between history and a contemporary and technologically enabled form of design practice. The colleagues with whom he is in good company are contributors and interlocutors of this publication alongside new figures that must be recognized as part of the discourse of today. Perhaps ironically, there is historic precedent for this genre of “transitional” practitioners such as Josef Hoffman, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Eliel Saarinen, Victor Horta, Bruno Taut,

Antoni Gaudi, and many others who similarly jumped headlong into new materials and technologies while remaining planted in historic discourse and professional disciplinarity. Neither fish nor fowl, these designers were as influential as they were idiosyncratic. The one thing they all were, and that they share with Mark, was that their work was historically situated, and yet specific to a contemporary moment. A generation of designers without this knowledge of history and discourse has suffered from a situation where their work has been justified only through their application of the digital technologies of the present, as they assumed that digital tools are good for anything everywhere. Mark Foster Gage and many of the protagonists in this book have avoided this pitfall through a combined knowledge of how the past and present intersect, and perhaps equally as important, their ongoing discussions with each other … a behind-the-scenes glimpse which is the subject of this important book.

Often in the digital studios of the last three decades vocational training in the latest software is prioritized over cultural and social reception, leading to a disconnect between technological innovation and cultural relevance. What is most exceptional about Mark Foster Gage and this book is their undeclared search for a bridge that links the architectural discourses of the past, present, and future. This struggle to situate work with historical precedent must

come from a desire to communicate with an audience in ways that resonate with the significance of historic canon, but instead use contemporary forms. The tensions between the editor and some contributors’ commitment to disciplinary history and colleagues who do not feel this is a

necessity is what makes this publication so interesting. This publication is extremely timely in its efforts to capture these tensions, and I can think of no better person to be able to capture the debates of this emerging generation than Mark Foster Gage.

Introduction

by Mark Foster Gage

“A veritable witness have you hitherto been, Ishmael; but have a care how you seize the privilege of Jonah alone; the privilege of discoursing upon the joists and beams; the rafters, ridge-pole, sleepers, and underpinnings, making up the framework of Leviathan…”

— Herman Melville, Moby Dick

(Chapter 102, “A Bower in the Arsacides”)

This book explores the importance of discussion between architects as an overlooked but defining aspect of the discipline of architecture, and therefore the design of our world. No creative disciplines occur in a vacuum, but architecture’s need for communication is particularly significant, relying as it does on numerous players and bodies of information including the more obvious professional expertise and construction knowledge—but also knowledge of history, technology, and a nearly two-millennia-long dialogue with theory, philosophy, and the world of ideas—also known as discourse. Philosophy and theory are often thought of as ancillary, even extraneous, to the discipline of architecture, especially today, and yet they are among

the first subjects listed as requirements for practice in, quite literally, the first lines of the first chapter of the first book ever written about architecture, De Architectura, or the Ten Books of Architecture, by Roman architect Marcus Pollio Vitruvius in 30 BCE. As such this book accepts as an axiom that moral knowledge and engagement with philosophy, through discussion, are inseparable from the discipline of architecture.

The discussions featured in this book cover a wide range of emerging intellectual territories in architecture ranging from Speculative Realism, high vs. low resolution, neo-primitivism, artificial intelligence, philosophies of care, the

post-digital, and new forms of social engagement, to name only a small sample. Architects whom I interviewed represent very different, even opposing, positions. They included Michael Young (Young & Ayata), Elena Manferdini (Atelier Manferdini); Florencia Pita (Florencia Pita & Co.); Ferda Kolatan (su11 architecture+design); Amina Blacksher (Atelier Amina) and V. Mitch McEwen (Atelier Office); Tom Wiscombe (Tom Wiscombe Architecture); Kristy Balliet (BairBalliet); Ellie Abrons, Adam Fure, Meredith Miller, and Tom Moran (T+E+A+M); Jiminez Lai (Bureau Spectacular); and Karel Klein and David Ruy (Ruy Klein).

So, here’s the hard part—who gets to “speak” for architecture? There is of course no acceptable answer to this question, but it can also not be doubted that some voices and ideas have more impact in the world than others. Historically, new ideas and their introduction into architecture by the few have consistently and dramatically altered the output of each generation of the architectural many—in due course. That is to say that while the days of ‘star-architecture’ and hero-worship in the profession may today be briefly passe, architecture will likely always have figures at the forefront of some form of architectural “newness” that will, if history is any judge, continue to have an outsized impact on the built environments of the future— even if only eventually.

While many architects are uncomfortable with the concept of progressive thought leaders in the profession who haven’t necessarily built much, architecture has always had such a vanguard of such emerging practitioners who push hard against the status quo, trying to redefine and improve what architecture is and can be. This is as true today as it was in ancient Rome when Vitruvius (who was actually a military ballistics engineer and had built almost nothing), called for revolutionary methods of employing Greco-Roman classicism to produce entirely new genres of urbanism that would eventually format entire continents. Le Corbusier began writing about his now-famous “Five Points” in the publication L’Esprit Nouveau in the early 1920s, at a time when he had only built a few houses—and all entirely in traditional styles. That is to say that innovative ideas tend to appear within architectural discourse long before they impact the built environment, or, in reverse, achievement in getting buildings built is rarely indicative of contributions to architectural discourse.

The conversations in this book likely tilt towards my own ambition to directly address the perceivable aspects of architecture as they are manifest in form, instead of humoring conceptual claims so frequently and casually made by architects that are entirely unrelated to actual design—or similar claims of architecture as policy making or other invisible formless

endeavors that have recently found purchase in a small handful of architectural schools. Accordingly, this book is heavily illustrated by actual design work done by the actual architects being interviewed. I believe it is only through the combination of words and design work together that convincing architectural arguments are ever made. There will likely be pushback to this, as part of today’s master-cliché is that the boundaries of the discipline have been expanded far beyond mere antiquated ideas of “building” to include, well, nearly everything. This may be true if we allow it to be … but if this is the case, who is then responsible for the built environment? If architects become the diagrammers of policy, curators of content, and creatives behind virtual experiences—who is designing the physical aspects of the real world that we all inhabit? While the figures I selected to interview offer extremely varied viewpoints, they all share an interest in architecture as thought and design made towards the production of form. This, therefore, is a book about how ideas actually shape architecture, not how non-architectural ideas shape more non-architectural ideas in order to be eternally celebrated as genius-powered expansions of the boundaries of architecture.

While this position draws a clear boundary around the discipline and discourse of architecture, it does not seek to in any way diminish the responsibility of architects

to act towards ethical and moral ends. All architects have the responsibility, through any discursive position, to address humanitarian concerns in all their many valences including issues of health, sustainability, equality, community engagement, and the pursuit of the just. None of these ambitions conflict with discussions about form, shape, the design of physical things—or, dare I say, their aesthetics. One criticism often levied against architects with an interest in the design of form is that in doing so they are not solving the larger social and political problems of the world. I don’t see that these ambitions are mutually exclusive. In fact, I worry that architects who claim to not be interested in mere form and are in favor of only socially performative ambitions are, by definition, defaulting to the status quo of standard practices for the deployment of forms and materials in the world. That is to say that architects who claim not to be interested in form are merely showcasing their support for the status quo of form production—and thus shouting their willingness to cede control of the design of form and materials to the established economically driven system of pure capitalist architectural production. Put another way, if an architect is not addressing the physical manifestations of form in their design work they are not remaining neutral, but rather are accepting that the architectural forms naturally produced by the economics of capitalism are sufficient for human needs. If architects do not

design the form of our built environment, economic spreadsheets with a sole concern for profit will. Nearly any late-20th-century city can attest to the abject failure of such a disciplinary retreat.

Knowledge about the current landscape of discourse-oriented practices featured in this book is intended to be of particular use to students and emerging practitioners of architecture, as they hold the future of architectural discourse in their hands. Its continued existence is not a given, but rather requires the continued contributions of every subsequent generation. These

future contributions, however, must be informed, and their authors can only be empowered through having knowledge of the landscape of architectural innovation and discussion into which they are entering. This book will hopefully allow such students and practitioners to position their work as such within a context of current and emerging architectural movements, ideas, technologies, and, at times, conflicts and arguments, as they continue the ongoing two-millennia-long conversation that arises from the seemingly small act of thinking, writing, and ultimately speaking of architecture.

First Chapter

Artificial Intelligence in Architecture

Discussion with Karel Klein and David Ruy of Ruy Klein

artificial intelligence, reification and power, digital debris, facticity through technology, re-enchantment, mythology

David Ruy: You don’t need me to tell you that something has changed. Though architecture has been talking about the crisis of the discipline since the 1960s, this time it feels real. Within the global pandemic that has so indelibly marked history now, technology has been playing a subtle but profound role in the emergency we face. We’ve come to a point of uncertainty about what is real and what is not. Facts co-mingle with fiction every day in both beautiful and terrifying ways. As the artist Hito, Steyerl says appropriately, “we’re now living within a debris field of images.” We live under the ever-present cloud of data and have difficulty resolving their reality with the facts, which we still nonetheless

see on the ground. It’s difficult to deny any longer that facts are constructed by institutions. With that realization and our heightened awareness now of colonialist legacies, it is so tempting to discard the problems of facticity altogether. But we also can’t deny just how dangerous that really is. How we build new concepts around the problem of fact might very well be the most important intellectual problem of the century. In the world of architecture, I’m thinking of how normal it is today to use a Google image search to hunt for precedent images. I’m thinking of how institutions we once relied on to construct their histories have lost their influence of authority. I’m thinking about how we know the world more through our

Discussion with Karel Klein and David Ruy of Ruy Klein

devices, like the phone in your pocket, right now than through books, museums, universities, or even firsthand experience. I’m thinking about how social media has become a primary instrument of cultural dissemination. It used to take a long time to get to know or develop a form and a style. Today, we might type in some words like “Le Corbusier + Five Points” and get back 1.7 million results in 0.62 seconds. Most of the images retrieved when we search in this way are copies of copies of copies. What does originality even mean anymore in this context? Who is retrieving these images for us? How should we use them? What are we to do with the surplus? Viktor Shklovsky once argued that great works of art do their work by familiarizing normal

reality and slowing down habits of perception and the beholder. Similarly, but with regard to the difficulty of authoring great works, Harold Bloom would later on assert in The Anxiety of Influence that masterpieces are nothing more than creative misinterpretations or misprisions of previous masterpieces. Maybe the new question for us is how such theories of estrangement are to be understood when it is not the human author doing the reading, writing, seeing, or imaging, but a machine author. Even more convoluted is the very same question relative to a hybrid human machine author. Though this may sound strange to you, I am interested in asking how a cyborg might design architecture. I would like to think more about the possibilities of

Discussion with Mitch McEwen and Amina Blacksher

other architects before. Before you get to any sort of design conversation there is this preemptive period. A firm I used to work at would call it “visioning,” and that involves a ton of work. It’s like a client orientation, getting them to know that the work you’re doing is designing the process of design, and that there is this responsibility that you take on in order to allow design to happen. A lot of clients may not be familiar with that process, and if they are, there is still some familiarization that needs to happen with your particular practice methods.

V. Mitch McEwen: Mark Wigley, who was formerly the dean at Columbia University when I was there, also had a significant impact on me. One of the things that he talked about was designing the client. Designing the client is a kind of strategic work, shaping them by changing their perspectives about architecture.

Sydney Maubert: I am interested in Amina’s jump-rope robot from the Black Imagination Matters event. I wonder if you could speak about your line of thinking for that project.

Amina Blacksher: I am not an expert in robotics, so this conference was an opportunity for me to have access to these tools and have a platform to discuss the research. I had dabbled with a few projects using the giant KUKA robotic arm at Yale, but other than that I didn’t have much experience. As for the conceptual side, the way I thought about the body in that project comes from Kyra Gaunt’s book, The Games Black Girls Play; it explores embodied formulas that we have in our body that record and understand, to a high degree, complex relationships. Things like the trip reflex that keeps us from falling, or proprioception, a concept that I think about a lot, which is certain awareness about parts of your body’s

Discussion with Mitch McEwen and Amina Blacksher

significant moments in their own architectural trajectory. What do those moments look like, and how do people their own age nourish their beliefs?

Michael Young: One of the things that Peter Eisenman taught me was that there were problems within architecture that have a historical dimension. If you can tap into this it means you are able to bring a historical relation to the discipline into a contemporary situation.

Mark Foster Gage: I think that’s an important point, that part of architectural discourse is also having dialogues with architects that may have been dead for centuries or even millennia. Some conversations take place over centuries, and they require a significant historical knowledge

about the field. I will say, this has always been one of the more enjoyable aspects of a discourse-based practice. I see my work as a way of creating a dialogue with the work of past architects, such as, Plečnik, William Burges, and a host of others who are rarely, if ever, covered in architectural schools.

Michael Young: For me, that was Borromini and baroque architecture; I had always been interested in them. It wasn’t until Peter Eisenman helped me to discursively access that, where it all of a sudden became a contemporary problem for me to deal with. Regarding other mentors, Jesse Reiser and Nanako Umemoto (RUR) were crucial for both Kutan Ayata and myself. Kutan worked for them for four years, I worked for them briefly.

Discussion with Michael Young

Mark Foster Gage: And you had Jesse Reiser as a professor.

Michael Young: I had Jesse Reiser as a professor at Princeton University. Also, Edward Eigen, who teaches at Harvard Graduate School of Design, taught me at Princeton. He is one of the smartest and most interesting architectural thinkers I know, in terms of knowledge about the history of science and the history of technology. He introduced me to the work of Bruno Latour, all of the connections that go back through the history of science come from him. Through the work of Bruno Latour, I got into a dialogue with the work of the philosopher Graham Harman, who David Ruy also knew. So these things all begin to link together. The other mentor I’ll mention is Miles Ritter, who you’ve likely never

heard of. Miles Ritter taught me descriptive geometry and projective geometry at Princeton. He has never written, he’s never published, but has extensive knowledge on architectural representation in terms of its histories, and its links to computation and digital technologies. He knows more about that stuff than anyone I’ve ever come across. Anyway, I just wanted to acknowledge the influences he’s had on me and, in a way, encourage you to find those kinds of people. They’re out there and they’re amazing.

Mark Foster Gage: That’s my experience as well, that all faculty and people don’t impact you equally. It’s massively lopsided. I think there have probably been five people in my life who determined my entire architectural direction. What role

this does sometimes backfire. I was speaking with Mimi Hoang of nARCHITECTS who was conveying how she told a student to look at the work of Josep Lluís Sert, only to return later and have that same student reply, “Yeah, that Sert guy doesn’t even have a website.” I digress, but I do think you’re correct in noting how the conference really leveraged the power of students

to participate in and produce discourse in a new way. I also believe it showcased the power that even young faculty can exert on institutions and institutional discourses.

Jimenez Lai: Before I arrived in Chicago, I was teaching at Ohio State University as part of a year-long fellowship slightly before Kristy was there. There are a few schools with a long running successful

Discussion with Jimenez Lai and Kristy Balliet

track record of these kinds of teaching fellowships for young faculty, and I always encourage students to pursue these. The University of Michigan, University of Buffalo, Ohio State University, and Rice University in particular have strong fellowships.

Mark Foster Gage: In addition to the influence of other young faculty and students

on your work, has there been a role for mentors other than the aforementioned ones that supported you financially for the Possible Mediums event?

Jimenez Lai: I believe Kristy and I share a few mentor figures. I know José Oubrerie is certainly one of them. I feel like Kristy and I are both, in a way, children of José, who is currently eighty-eight years old.

Discussion with Elena Manferdini and Florencia Pita

for chromatic spaces, and such desire has moved from the internet into architecture and then back to the digital image, posted and shared. During the past few years we have witnessed the proliferation of vibrant chromatic physical experiences, a so-called Instagram-friendly architecture. Social media has instigated the desire for a new genre of spaces, namely pop-ups, which are designed to be imageable, and shareable on social media. Yet these spaces are not designed to be permanent in the way that architecture historically has been. The function of these experiences is to act as a background for the imagination, for acting, for posing, for selfies of a diverse society. The method of dissemination is built into the space. Color has entered architecture and in a dramatic new way.

Mark Foster Gage: Architecture is being consumed as an image on Instagram as much as it is a building in real space, and color allows that real space to play a more important role within this social media milieu. It’s a really interesting idea. I also think what you said about designing through light is important, how the vibrancy we have access to is greater than any group of architects have had access to in human history. Colored pencils on a piece of paper, for example, very literally pales in comparison to looking at an Illustrator document on your screen that has a million colors that are all backlit with illuminating light. You also described a level of

Discussion with Mark Foster Gage and Claude Rains

varied work of these figures can attest to. Of course, when discussing a historic idea of cannon like this we need to be cognizant of the voices left out of the equation by virtue of sex and race, but the idea spotlights a very interesting question for architecture. I wonder if someone wrote a book called “The Hedgehog and the Fox: Architectural Edition,” which people would fall into which camp. Having said all of this, I’m a fox. While I have expertise in certain things, like aesthetics or classical form, it’s not at the expense of knowing other things. I love physics, especially quantum discoveries, astronomy, and etymologies, but only as an amateur. Architecture benefits from knowledge about many things, but that can happen in the individual architect, or through collaboration between experts. If I was designing my own architecture school I would want to incorporate at least one survey course that went very shallow into a whole bunch of traditions, and then I would let people choose to go deep in certain areas. I wish I had such a thing in school. It wasn’t until recently that I discovered some amazing historic architecture that I had never even heard about in these incredible necropolis structures in Uzbekistan, some of which are a millennium old. Why had I never been introduced to them in a theory class? I actually went to Uzbekistan a few years ago to see them, in Samarkand. I’ve taken classes on vaulting and stone architecture and I know everything about a very small and specific

amount of Western classicism as it goes from Greece to Rome into Europe to the United States. How did I not come across this incredible Uzbek corbelling and vaulting? I would have taken a class only on that if it had been available because it’s so much more intricate than western domes and apses. I would have taken a really deep dive into that really specific area had it been available, but it wasn’t. There is a value in giving people, especially in an architectural education, a shallow survey of a lot more of what exists in the world. It’s actually really frustrating to me when I see

that most of the history classes offered in architecture schools are really only about the history of western architectural modernism. Start out in fox classes and later take hedgehog classes as you learn what interests you.

Stav Dror: Your work relies significantly on renderings, which obviously cost money. How is it sustainable to develop such a high volume of photo realistic images?

Mark Foster Gage: In my twenty-year career we’ve probably only commissioned

twenty renderings. Almost all of what we do is in-house. My first architecture job was as a watercolor renderer, so I have a good grasp on at least the manual, paintbrush version of that field. A lot of those skills are transferrable to a digital world; how light behaves, how materials behave, etc. In order to learn how to shift from a paper world to a digital world, over the years I’ve also personally taken online courses from Hollywood professionals on the subject of Matte painting. This is for work but crosses over as a little bit of a hobby for me. The long and short of it, is

that we do them in-house because I enjoy doing them. It saves a ton of money, but it does take quite a bit of time to do the photo-realism that we do. It would be much easier if I did boxy axonometric on pastel pink backgrounds as seems to be the rage these days. Yet I persist…

Stav Dror: To achieve this level of intricacy in your projects, clearly your clients have to be incredibly rich.

Mark Foster Gage: Either they have to be rich or you have to be clever about how you organize the process. The level of exposure

ORO Editions

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Published by ORO Editions

Copyright © 2023 Mark Foster Gage.

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Author: Mark Foster Gage

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